How a person acts at any moment is influenced not only by their present environment but also by past and potential future events. Philosophers, scholors, and ordinary people have tried to understand how that could be. Much psychological research has focused on concepts like memory and habit to account for the influence of the past. However, during much of this century, scientific efforts to understand how potential future events could influence present behavior have been limited or rejected as inappropriate. Study of past influences was acceptable because it fit the dominant mechanistic, linear causality models. Serious empirical study of behavioral functions represented by concepts like intention, purpose and goal was minimal until recently, and was often related to practical problems or the global concept of motivation. The resurgence of cognitive psychology, the recognition that humans are active as well as reactive organisms, and the development of theoretical frameworks which focus on the organization and development of behavior in ecological context, have reestablished interest in directive functions. Open systems models represent a promising new framework, because their relationship to control theory demonstrates the existence and importance of directing and controlling influences in complex systems. This study utilizes such a framework. It seeks to further refine methods for assessing the patterns of short and long term goals that people use to direct and guide their behavior, to examine age-related differences in those patterns; and to examine the relationships between individuals' goal hierarchies and other behavior. Many kinds of mental health problems appear to be partially the consequence of people having nothing to strive for; having goals which they seem unable to fulfill, which conflict with one another, or which are socially unacceptable; or having an insufficient diversity of, or integration of, short term and longer term goals. A greater understanding of such cognitive functions, and the development of effective methods of assessing them, could be valuable for social policy formulation, for human services strategies and methods, and for valuable social policy formulaton, for human services strategies and methods, and for development, selection, and use of psychotherapy theories and methods.